Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Library of Congress Linked Data Service

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Owner
  
Library of Congress

Commercial
  
No

Written in
  
Python

Website
  
id.loc.gov

Content license
  
Public domain

The LC Linked Data Service is an initiative of the Library of Congress that publishes authority data as linked data. It is commonly referred to by its URI: id.loc.gov.

Contents

The first offering of the LC Linked Data Service was the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) dataset, which was released in April 2009.

Datasets

  • Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
  • Library of Congress Name authorities
  • Library of Congress Classification—because LC Classification uses a different MARC format than LC Authorities, mapping LC Classification to MADS/RDF was more difficult than mapping LCSH or LC Name authorities.
  • Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials
  • Various MARC codes
  • Various preservation vocabularies

    • Formats

    The service presents data in MADS/RDF and SKOS where appropriate, but also uses its own ontology to describe classification resources and relationships more accurately. All records are available individually via content negotiation as XHTML/RDFa, RDF/XML, N-Triples, and JSON.

    Each vocabulary is also available to download in its entirety. Id.loc.gov does not currently provide a SPARQL endpoint.

    Uses

    All of LCSH are cross linked with RAMEAU (Répertoire d’autorité matière encyclopédique et alphabétique unifié), an authority file from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

    Technical aspects

    The id.loc.gov site uses a fairly lightweight Python program to serve linked data.

    References

    Library of Congress Linked Data Service Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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